


We'll Be Making Sweet Music Together!

by Mr_Dynasty



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Band Break Up, Champagne, F/F, Fake Science, Jealousy, Scheming, Threesome - F/F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 15:13:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 11,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4440731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mr_Dynasty/pseuds/Mr_Dynasty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When hot commodities become sought after by more than just those with the intent to use them for the purpose intended, only two things are certain: hearts and loins will ignite. With Roxie looking to get back at a former band mate, and J looking to spread terror in a whole new way, Sabrina becomes the target of both their desires in a most direct way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Dry Spell

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by all the J/Sabrina work that Psychic Absol has been doing. I thought to myself, "Golly, I wonder what a Roxie/Sabrina/J triangle-fic would look like." And so, I began to write what you now see before you. Another AU-ish '2K10 spinoff.

Roxie sat with her fist to her cheek, wondering how the hell she could top what she was seeing. “Seriously, who’s cock do you have to suck to get play time like this?” She guessed it was probably whoever’s cock Billy was sucking, because it seemed like every other music video on rotation today had Billy Jo Graham strutting her stuff all over it.

From the looks of things, Billy was really putting her back into the job, as well.

Oh, she told herself, no need to be sour grapes over it. Billy was having smashing success as as a solo-artist since the formal breakup, going on to release single after single after single without her and Nicky’s help in the slightest. And Roxie guessed she wouldn’t have taken it so personally, were it a bit easier to believe the breakout success was not intended as a slap in her face. 

With Billy’s debut album being titled “Fuck you, Roxie” though, this was somewhat harder to dismiss. The four--count them, four!--singles off the album; “Yes, Bitch,” “I Am Talkin’ About You,” “To Be Specific: (Virbank, not Rustboro),” and “Seriously, Fuck You Roxie” were pretty much dead giveaways, however.

Roxie groaned, and flopped onto her back, inverting the ransacked decor that surrounded her, and remarking that it was no more appealing upside down than it was rightside up. 

Nicky, nearby, overhearing from where he was flopped across the couch, playing Gameboy Color--for Nicky was a notoriously intolerable genwunner--commented crassly. “Maybe you shouldn’t have trashed the hotel room.”

Roxie made hands at the girl on TV explosively. “Oi! I lost my mind temporarily, okay? The sight of all my hopes and dreams dying in three minutes of scantily-clad television drove me to the brink, okay? Gerrof my back!”

Nicky, who’d not spared much attention to her earlier tantrum, looked up at the television and whistled. “Yeah. She’s certainly going a little pop-idol with her look lately, huh?” They both noted the leather pants and halter had been traded in for a thigh-highs and a leather teddy, with slightly more relish than was really appropriate of former bandmates.

“Slut,” Roxie commented, waving a hand about, clearly not as displeased as the comment made her seem.

“How jelly are you, right now,” Nicky asked, glancing over the top of his imported pokemon green cartridge, “on a scale from one to ten?”

Roxie put two fists into her eyes and hissed. “Yes.”

Nicky shrugged. “Well, really, all you gotta do is write better songs than Billy, man.”

“Whaaaat?” Roxie cried, sitting up and turning around indignantly. “Billy wrote all our songs, you know that!” Roxie had never written a song before! Hell, there was a time not too long ago where she hadn’t even been able to play a song, much less write one!”

“It’s either that,” Nicky said seriously, “Or grow a pair of tits bigger than hers.”

After watching a bit more of the music video, both seemed impossible, but given that one seemed slightly less impossible than the other, Roxie pulled out her laptop.

When she was dissatisfied with the results that a search-engine query for “natural breast enlargement” returned, she resolved to face up against the insurmountability of it all, and try her hand at writing a damn song.


	2. The Right Stuff

“See, this is why I ‘ate smokin’ wiv you. It’s always some contraption!” She looked at the vaporizer in her hands, it’s long, complicated-looking heating element trailing a coiled electrical cord to the wall-plug. “Wot ever 'appened to just putting a spliff in your mouth, and takin’ a drag, eh?”

Nicky shrugged. “Not as much tar gets in your lungs, if you don’t burn it. It’s better for you, this way.”

“Better for you?!” Roxie yelped. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why she was doing it, then. “Fuck, I’m sorry! I thought we were rock-stars, and 'ere we’ve been pussies this whole time!”

“Just hit it and pass me the damn thing, would you? I’m not even stoned yet and you’re killing my buzz.”

She laughed, putting the ringed mouthpiece over her lips, and sucking in what didn’t even amount to cold smoke until her lungs were full. She angled her mouth, exhaling down and to the side. She didn’t think much of it, so she gave it up after one. “I guess I shouldn’t complain. At least I’m not having to deal wiv the damn carpentry anymore.”

Nicky smiled in the middle of a long pull, and erupted into coughing. “Do you remember--” He put his lips into his bicep and coughed a few more times. “Do you remember when we were in that festival venue in Fiore, and I couldn’t find a smoke shop anywhere and ended up making a bong out of a hollowed out custap berry and a ballpoint pen.”

“Oh, I remember,” Roxie rolled her eyes. “I remember thinking, what have we been reduced to?”

It was Nicky’s turn to snort, which he took just before another hit from the vape. “Hey, it’s a cruel world out there, sometimes. But where there’s a will, there is always a way, man.” He rubbed a hand over his bald head as he spat out a stream of thin vapor. “Speaking of which, show me what you’ve got.”

Roxie, uncertain, angled her laptop slightly away from Nicky. “Uh, well, I thought maybe the best place to start writing a song, would be the title.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Well...”

“...Well?”

“What do you think of Sex Explosion?” She asked, obviously with the intent to impress.

Nicky, however, looked skeptical. “Doesn’t sound very catchy.”

Stymied, Roxie scrolled down a bit. “Awrite, how about: Dry Sex?”

Nicky winced. “I’m going with no.”

“Hypercunt?”

“Pass.”

“Thunderfuck Deluxe?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Orgasm till Death?”

“Next.”

“Shredded Co--”

“Hu-uh!”

“Sexecutioner.”

Nicky perked. “Oh, I like that one.” 

Roxie grinned brightly. “Yeah?”

Then, sarcasm becoming apparent, Nicky’s eyebrows flatted. “No! That sucks! Try again!”

Roxie frowned, determinedly. “How about: I Wanna Ride Your Mouth.”

Nicky paused, and looking contemplative, took another long hit before answering. “...That’s a triple-A rank song-title right there.”

Roxie smirked. 

“Unfortunately, that’s already the name of the 5th track off of “Fuck You, Roxie.”

Roxie knit her brows, and raked the manilla envelope that Billy had sent to their hotel-room off the glass tabletop and dug around for the album inside, which she’d grudgingly left unopened. When she spun it to the reverse to check the track listing. Annoyingly, Billy had left a sticky note attached, reading--

“Hey, Rox!

Just thought I would send you a copy of my debut. You know, so you can practice singing along to it, for when you’re sitting in the audience at the Unovan Music Choice Awards, listening to me perform it live on stage without you, right before I get my award for Best Music Video. See you there, if you somehow manage to get yourself invited.

PS: Sorry I forgot to include a gun for you to kill yourself out of envy in this package, but I’ve been busy lately, unlike you.”

She ripped it off in disgust, and crumpled in her fist as she checked the track listing. Sure enough, there it was, plain as day: 5.) I Wanna Ride Your Mouth ... 2:48.

“Dammit all.” She swore.

Nicky sat back up from the coffee table. “Look, Roxie. I think you need to approach this from a different angle.”

“Like wot?”

“What you need...” Nicky smiled, and offered her a hand. “...is a gimmick.”


	3. The New Deal

“So who did you ‘ave in mind?”

“Well, with Danny and Ollie split to join Billy’s band, not much sense in pretending you or I have a lick of creative musical talent, does it?”

Roxie opened her mouth to object, but then let the protest taper out in the back of her throat. That was...sort of true, actually. “I guess not.”

So I thought, hey, might be a good idea to find someone who can, yanno, actually play guitar...”

“Right, right but,” Roxie scratched her scalp under the birds-nest of pale hair she possessed. “I dunno how I really feel about somebody new up in the front with me. I kinda like to do things my way.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’ve considered the dynamic.” Nicky assured. “Whoever we pick will have to have the right stuff. They can’t be too outgoing, or too photogenic, otherwise it might interfere with your looming stage-presence, or my crowd-pleasing looks, right?”

The rocker eyeballed her drummer skeptically. “I think you got that one backwards, mate.”

Nicky didn’t even acknowledge he’d been corrected. “So I found us just the guy. Real chill dude, none too intimidating, but he’s got some real guitar-chops, alright? He’s from Nimbasa, you’ll like him.”

“I dunno, Nicky. I mean--”

Nicky was already pushing her along into the studio, however. “Just come on!”

The guy standing in the recording space was, in a word, totally non-threatening. He looked like a flower-powered hippie pulled out of time, as he stood there, strumming an acoustic guitars in ripped-knee jeans and brown sandals. “Meet Preston,” Nicky said, in a rush, as he scooted past her to facilitate hand-shakes and how-do-you-dos. 

She almost felt awkward, not on her own account, but on Preston’s as he stood there, shaking hands with two roughnecks like her and Nicky in their Donphan-era leather and spikes, like some soccer-dad having taken his daughter on a backstage tour of a death-metal band he knew nothing about. 

But she was surprised when her hand finally clapped into Preston's and she could feel those guitar-player fingers lace around her palm with grace and surety. She was even more surprised, and pleasantly, when he made Giratina-horns with his other hand, extending both pointer and pinky. “Stoked to meet you. Totally rad.” 

She smirked. “Lets see you play, Blondie, then we’ll see if I say the same.” She glanced down past his arm. “I expect you’ll be needing to ditch the grandpa-guitar, eh?”

He grinned at the challenge, and slipped the acoustic’s strap over his shoulder. At Nicky’s direction, he selected one of Billy’s old studio rigs off of the wall. A classic gold-top with modified black hardware, and crobat-wing inlays on the fretboard. Seeing that guitar again--the one she’d made famous during their last tour as Koffing and the Toxics!--made Roxie feel nostalgic and a bit nervous, but when preston started to play...

He played “Blood & Thunderstone”, which was an old track Danny had wrote, during their initial tour as Donphan, note for note, by memory. It was a needlessly complex song, because, well, that was how Danny had always written them. Danny was a musical genius, almost the point that he over-constructed simply for his own amusement. But where as Danny played with skill and precision, Preston played with... 

Well, Preston played with feeling. Preston played with soul.

He clutched the guitar, not like an instrument, not like a medium of expression, but like a lover. And that guitar, which she had more than once imagined as being only loyal to Billy, on the occasions she had picked it up and failed to play it with any bravado, it simply wailed for him. It screamed at his touch, as though elated. He made that guitar sing for him, more than he actually played it.

Roxie cut his amplifier, abruptly, from the console. She’d heard enough.

“What?” Nicky snarled. “He barely even--”

“He’s hired.”

Nicky pumped his fist. Preston, who had before tried to keep his cool, put both hands to either side of his nose and covered his trembling mouth. “Awesome. Totally Awesome, man,” he said, with a quaver in his voice. “Always wanted to play with you guys.”

She turned briskly to Nicky. “Now that just leaves us to find one other member.”

Nicky blinked. “I thought you didn’t want to share the front?”

Roxie shook her head. “Naw. I’m talking about a pokemon, here, not a person. We need to find a new mascot. A new centerpiece, Nicky. Our gimmick!”

Nicky’s face split in a grin. “Sounds killer. What did you have in mind?”

“I dunno yet!”

“Something badass, like an Umbreon!”

Roxie stood on her tiptoes excitedly. “Or a Chestnaught!”

Nicky countered “Or a Scisor!”

Roxie slapped the console. “Oooh, a Typhlosion!”

Nicky snapped his fingers and then pointed at her, eyes wide. “A METAGROSS!”

She gasped. “Oh, that’s fuckin’ metal!

They both turned to Preston, when he interjected weakly. “...What about a Meloetta?”

Their reactions however, were altogether different. Nicky turned his point at Roxie into a critical thumbs-down toward their new guitarist, and prepared to blow a huge raspberry in jeer, but Roxie barked first. “Wot?!”

“Meloetta,” Preston repeated, warily. “You know, the legendary Melody pokemon. They say it’s vocalization can control the feelings of the people who hear it’s sweet Relic Song. I was just thinking about how that sounded perfect.”

“That ain’t exactly very metal, though, is it?” Nicky began to grouse again, but Roxie cut him off with a wave. A stirring was happening, somewhere deep inside her brain. Maybe it was Nicky’s vaporized weed finally kicking in, but it was a stirring none the less. 

She had a thought then, a vision, really, of herself in six months time, graciously accepting a Unovan Music Choice Award in the category of Best Album, for her newest LP “You Couldn’t Afford It, Billy.” And this would be after the ones she got in Best Rock Song for “Eat Shit and Die, Whore” and in Best Music Video for a song with an equally trite and insulting title, she was sure.

“Awrite. I guess that’s it then.”

“What?!” Nicky barked.

She shrugged. “I’m gonna catch us a Meloetta.”

Nicky practically face faulted. “Roxie, Meloetta is an incredibly rare, legendary pokemon,” he sighed. “What you’re talking about is next to impossible.”

“Well then, I suppose, twenty-some-odd years from now, when they’re making a behind-the-band documentary about us, when they talk about Billy, they’re just gonna say ‘Billy Jo ‘oo? Oh, old uh, Billy Jo what’s-her-face? Isn’t that the dried up old cunt what used to play for Roxie Toxic?’ then they’re gonna show film of that old cunt crying her eyes about about how her career shriveled up and died on account of our band showing up at our next tour date with a Meloetta, and rockin’ the whole fuckin’ world down to it’s knees, eh? And the next bit they show after it will be a cut-away to me, venerable rock goddess that I’ll be at that time, laughing my sculpted,--dare I say cougar-esque--late-forty-year-old leather-pants-wearing ass off, about how I was a risk-taker, and dared to do the bloody impossible, while I stand in front of a wall-full of platinum records, and money rains down from the fuckin’ cieling, won’t they?”


	4. The Rebel Without a Clue

Roxie groaned as she looked up into the harsh florescent lighting, to provoke her body along. The overhead lamplight swiveled sidelong, as she looked at it, weirdly. 

She had ended her first day of searching, an empty-handed failure. She’d been all over the wilds near Undella Town, where honestly she had no fucking business being in the first place, she now knew. She was a rock-star, not a belt-and-backpack trainer! Now she knew why most kids quit after the first few years of journeying. This shit was hard work!

Her feet hurt, her back ached, and she was sweaty and disgusting in places a woman ought to have no business being sweaty and disgusting. So, of course, she’d gone to the one place where all who were down-and-out could take solace: the pub. And oh, had she ever tied one off. Quite a few “one”s were the truth to be told. Too many “one”s, if all the arguing her belly and skull were putting up with one another was any indication. She ran back a mental tally of all she’d drank, lost count, tried again, and then gave up when she realized that she was only counting shots, and not the beers she’d dropped them into.

She kept losing her balance, as she stared up at the ceiling. She felt like a spinning top, losing the battle with inertia, wobbling more and more as she inexorably slowed, and spilled over sideways. Standing with her legs bowed, she tilted backward, and tried not to let the inevitable happen

Luckily, she didn’t topple over. What was going on right now would have made for an especially disastrous fall, after all, and she didn’t dare risk it. She reached out and put one free hand on the chrome pipe set into the wall, and held on, as she waited patiently.

Overhead, the speakers belched out “Seriously, Fuck You Roxie” in a quiet, dolorous progression of chords. 

“Fuck my life, right now,” Roxie groaned.

She used her free hand to pry her buzzing gear out of her pocket, flicked her thumb across it to pick up, and then cupped it between her ear and shoulder. This made the task of staying balanced even more difficult, but it did free up her hand for the more important task of keeping her clothes pinned out of the way.

Nicky answered after a few rings. “Hey Rox. Any luck?”

“Fuck no,” she burbled. “None at all.”

Nicky grunted. “You sound awful. You doin’ okay?”

Roxie hiccuped, which stopped her from answering at first. “Keen, luv. Keen.”

Nicky tutted, as though he knew better. “Bombs again, huh?” he asked, his best guess at her earlier imbibing.

“Few.” Roxie scoffed.

“...at a time?”

“Wot ‘ov it?” 

He changed the subject. “So, are you giving up?”

Roxie sighed. “I dunno.”

“Maybe we could pick something else for a mascot? Preston says he knows a guy who can hook us up with an Absol already in full contest condition.”

She considered it. “An Absol, huh?”

“Yeah, man. Red Scarf and everything.”

She shook her head violently, which honestly, did nothing helpful for her condition. “No, mate, no.” She hiccuped again. “I gotta’ see this ‘frue. Meloetta or Bust. right?”

Nicky was quiet for a time, then said. “Sure, Roxie. I’m behind you.”

She smiled. Nick was a swell guy. It was the liquor and she knew it, but she started tearing up almost instantly. Before she could speak, though, Nicky made an effort to cut it off at the knees. “Yes. I know you love me, don’t start the waterworks, please.”

She coughed it out, and tried to reinvest herself in the physical task at hand. Once she got things started, they would progress more or less on their own, but it was the getting started part that was hard. She was anxious, and the fact that she could feel someone staring at her wasn’t helping either.

“...Don’t you have a friend who’s real big on the pokemon science stuff? That really dweeby-looking dude who met us after that show in Saffron? Couldn’t he help you?” Nicky asked from the other end.

Roxie blinked. “...I dunno, maybe.”

“Why don’t you try giving him a call?”

Roxie nodded. “Awrite. I will.”

“Cool, man.”

“I’m gonna let you go, though. I’m in the middle of sumfin’.”

“Alright. Seeya.” 

She hung up, and then immediately revolved toward the source of her earlier discomfort. She was surprised to find not one person, but three persons, staring at her like they were witnessing a truly awe-inspiring feat. “Fuck, wot is it?! You never seen a lady handle her fucking business before?! Bugger off already, for fuck’s sake!!”

None of the men, who had stood transfixed said anything intelligible as they dispersed, but it didn’t matter. Giving them a proper scream had gotten things going. “Ah. Sweet relief,” she gasped amid the sound of a coursing stream of liquid hitting the back of the urinal she was bowed s-shaped in front of. 

Pulling the job off otherwise expertly, she hoped for the best with regards to forgoing the standard dab-off, and just pulled her knickers straight back up over her knees. 

Adding insult to injurious breach of standard gender boundaries, she picked her beer up off the urinal’s flat porcelain top, and paused only to take a healthy swig of it before stumbling back out of the Men’s Restroom into the pub proper.

“...and I didn’t even wash my damn hands,” she chortled to herself. “Fuck the establishment!”

Right bloody rebel you are, Roxie, she thought. Right bloody rebel, indeed.


	5. The Indecent Proposal

She waited until morning to call Holly, which proved a mistake for two reasons. 

One, she didn’t anticipate the time-difference between Unova and Orre being quite so large, so when Holiday picked up the phone-call looking like he’d just wrestled his way out of whatever clustered grouping of laboratory machinery what served as his bed, he seemed none too happy to discover it was her.

For two, she herself was quite grouchy as well, being that she was more hungover than any two people had any right to be.

This culminated in a very intense, rapid argument, which Holiday, by virtue of being the more cantankerous of the two of them, won by default. The fact that he was not hampered by pounding headache was also a strong contributor, she was sure.

“Oi,” she offered him, right off. “I need your ‘elp wiv sumfin’.”

In turn, he looked at her like she was insane. “Oh, well let me just get this neat little device I just whipped together and--” He shuffled about on the table below the camera for a moment, before faking a gasp. “Here it is!” He held “it” up, in front of the camera: a tightly clasped fist, with thumb and middle finger glaringly extended. “This should do the trick! I’ll send you a diagram, so you can build your own, then go fuck yourself with it.” he offered scathingly.

She let him see two fingers of her own in the camera of her gear “...And a good morning to you, too, arsehole.” 

“What the fuck do you want?” Holiday snarled. “I’m not asking because I intend to do anything about it, just so I know what I’m about to hang up on you for, before I slam the phone down.”

Frustrated by his lack of enthusiasm, Roxie sucked in air, and showed her teeth as well. “Don’t just blow me off, you cheeky little shit!”

Holiday stared back at her with bags under his eyes. “Do you even know what time it is, Roxie? You’re calling me in the middle of the night, about who knows what! Granted, I’d probably fucking hang up on you even if you were calling me in the middle of the daytime, since I’m sure you’re about to ask me some ignorant fucking question you’ve been up all night thinking about on account of watching science documentaries while stoned out of your mind.”

“That was one time!”

“Look, either the next thing to come out of your mouth is that you’ve just gotten off the phone with Champion Cynthia, and your problem is that she’s desperately looking for a dick to suck, but you don’t have one to give her, and you were hoping I would take one for the team, or this conversation is going to come to an abrupt end, because you don’t have any problem I’m willing to find a solution for at three o’clock in the fucking morning.”

She blinked. “Honestly, mate, were that the case, I’d be askin’ you to help me grow a cock, not wantin’ to borrow yours.”

“Goodbye, Roxie.” Holiday said with finality, and moved to set the receiver down.

“Oi!” Roxie protested. “I done plenty of shit for you, lately, you little four-eyed git! I played your little bullshit games wiv that Ash kid--which was creepily nonce-ish, by the way, whatever you were up to.”

“Kid’s not important anymore.” Holiday shrugged. “Don’t care.”

“And I even fronted the money to fix that gizmo down in the radio-tower basement, even though I’m not even the one who broke it, eh?”

Holiday snorted. “Tough shit. Not my problem. Take it up with my boss.”

Guilt exhausted, she moved right onto extortion. “Also, I’ve got this Archer fellow, who represents a certain Silph Co, hasslin’ my record label day in and day out, over some stolen items and whether or not I know anything about two meat-heads who just so happened to have gotten themselves caught on tape! Now, I’m not much for discussing these types of things, really. What ‘appens in Saffron should stay in Saffron, after all. But, I ‘fink, I just ‘fink, if you were to stress me any further the fuck out, by hanging up on me in my time of need, I might just have a sudden surge of recollection, mate. I really might!” She pointed dangerously at the camera “So if you want to fuckin try me, just you go ahead and put that phone down, and see how fast it takes me to remember that you weren’t actually with me in a pink and yellow cardigan and wool shorts at the Drink-Drank, and thus have no alibi!”

Holiday hissed. “Has anyone ever told you what an insufferable whore you are?”

Roxie, knowing she’d won, smiled widely. “The subject has come up, yes.”

“Good. I’d hate to think it was just now being addressed.” Holiday huffed. “What the hell do you want, anyways?”

“I need you to help me catch a Meloetta.”

She didn’t get much of a chance to follow up with exactly how she expected him to help, since rather than ask, Holiday just rolled both of his eyes high up into his skull until it looked like he was about to die of a brain-hemorrhage, and then immediately and viciously slammed the receiver back onto the hook, ending the call. 

Roxie, stunned, held her gear and puffed out her cheeks angrily. “Oh, you fuckin’ twat!”

She considered furiously redialing him, and just annoying the fuck out of him until she got what she wanted, but then, she realized that she was in no real mood, or shape, to deal with him again so soon. More than content to sleep until a more appropriate time, and rest off her nausea, Roxie reclined a bit on the bed. Not completely, of course, because then the room would start spinning again; just enough to get comfortable.

She awoke again, at the crack of five in the afternoon, eyes blurry and headache of the previous night mostly pushed out by the headache of needing to renew her systems of all the things it so earnestly needed to function.

She went to the hotel-room kitchenette, and filled a complementary paper cupful of water. She disliked water intensely. Who could stand the stuff, when alcohol was so much better? Still, she pinched her nose, and downed the stuff to wet her throat, knowing it would make the next part easier if the wasn’t having to do it with dry-mouth.

Beginning the process, she swallowed five Valium, then a handful of No-doz. Then she waited for ten minutes, pacing. Following that, she took half an Adderall and then two Xanax. After that she went to the bathroom, and put some eyedrops in her face, to clear up the blur of a full days sleep. To complete the overall balancing act, she dug around in her gig bag for a bottle and a bag. From the bottle, which was just sloe gin, she poured three fingers into the paper cup. As she drank that, she poured a bit of the bag's contents onto the countertop. 

Just a bit, though. This stuff was the purest of the pure, and hard to come by, besides. Yayo was in short supply, with the Ranger’s cracking down on all the big-time coca growers in Oblivia, after all. So she spilled just enough to scrape into a small line with crisp edge of a pokedollar, then rolled it up and snorted the lot.

She rubbed her nose harshly and squinted. “There we go. Right as rain.”

Feeling human again, she flopped back down on the bed, and made to call Holly again, but there was already a message waiting for her on her gear. An email. From him, in fact. She read it with subdued interest, at first...

“Cunt,” read the heading, beginning what was an efficiently short email, by sparing no further letters to identify its recipient. “Here’s the shit you wanted. Should help you find your Meloetta. If not, please irritate someone else. Signed, H.”

Attached was an exhaustive medical report in pdf, which made Roxie’s heart sink, when she opened it, and realized just how long it was. Almost three-hundred pages of a bunch of words she just barely understood. Her head swam. 

Then, she realized, bless his shriveled lesion of a heart, that Holiday had highlighted the important bits for her, with notes in the margins.

She picked up in the middle of a paragraph about psychic telepathy, which she realized was a large theme of the report itself, as she read it over.

“High-intensity, low-band psychoactive waves, blah-blah-blah,” she read aloud, scanning on a bit for Holly’s next highlight. “...known to attract certain types of Pokemon.” 

She scrolled down, but even his notes here were terribly vague: “I’d suggest you find a psychic, and get them to help.”

“That’s it?!” Roxie snapped. The bastard was putting her off! 

She scrolled on, fuming, but that was only until she made it all the way to the bottom. A large paragraph had been outlined in yellow, there. “Subindex B: Case-study 4: An Experiment in Psychic Sexuality.”

It was a firsthand account of an analytical test, or so the heading said in parentheticals. Only it didn’t read that way. Instead, it sounded like something out of a harlequin novel. It detailed how the psychic mind grew more excited as the test went on, becoming more and more aroused. The actual sex part was all in very clinical terms, but she found herself swept up in the narrative all the same. She didn’t notice she was chewing on her fingertip, until she made it to the last line...

“We still aren't quite sure what happened to the test equipment. Possible overload, or maybe just a system-failure brought on by faulty wiring. What is clear, however, is that a Psychic's outward expression of their mental energy, is at it’s absolute highest levels, just as they crest the verge of physical elation, i.e. Orgasm.”

Below, Holly had typed only one note further, a rhetorical question. “Weren’t you fucking with that really creepy chick in Saffron? Yanno, the wierdo Gym Leader with the heavy bangs? Why don’t you go talk to her? Find your pokemon and make scissors too or whatever it is you dykes do with each other: This way, you’ll kill two flying types with one incredibly gay stone.”

She clapped the gear shut and sat upright. Alone, among all the times she discounted it, and denied it, this was probably the one time she felt the words coming out of her mouth without an ounce of sarcasm: 

“...Holly, you are a fuckin’ genius.”


	6. The Ripe Opportunity

As one famous rockstar lifted off the tarmac in an airliner to Kanto, an infamous criminal sat in her quarters, no less airborne, and no less intrigued by the possibility before them.

J did not make a habit of keeping up to date on persons of interest in regions which did not concern her any longer. Unless they were particularly wealthy, or else, much invested with the idea of her capture, she had always felt it best to pursue a policy of avoidance. 

Still, that didn’t mean she was completely blind to the goings-on of the world, nor Kanto at large. She still got semi-regular updates from Pierce, after all, and in the recent past, that had proven quite sufficient.

But now, she was quite interested, and wondered why in the world she had never before caught wind of such an exploitability! It seemed so obvious now that she was looking at it.

She would never regret the day she’d decided to open her own “back-door” into the Cipher database. Those network security goons were always looking for some cutting-edge cyber-attack, or wunderkind-hacker responsible for their missing data-packets, but it just went to show you that sometimes the old methods of corporate were best. She hadn’t troubled herself with getting into their massive, and heavily guarded server room. Instead, she’d done something more simple. 

She put pressure on a guy in their IT department, until he’d agreed to forward her the data. No great threat, in the scope of things she had on offer, just standard boilerplate stuff: Mangle your genitals, feed you bits and pieces of your wife’s insides, anally fornicate your children with blunt and/or sharp objects, dependant to their preference, that sort of thing. 

Unlike her contemporaries, she didn’t really need to rely on computer-work to get her job done. She used no complex malware, or packet-sniffing. That sort of thing was for people who had way too much time on their hands. 

Now, most of what was sent to her was complete junk, and anymore she really only bothered herself with the emails from upper-level executives and the like. This particular message however, had caught her interest in no uncertain terms.

She sat back in her seat, and folded her arms, lithe organic over heavy mechanical. “Orgasmic power,” she said with a chuckle.

The study had been conducted in far-away Unova, of course, with some Psychic of much lesser importance than this one, by all reports, but now that the connection had been made, how could she even deny that this was an opportunity ripe for her to pluck?

“And a Meloetta in the bargain as well,” J hissed to herself. How could the deal get any sweeter?

She got up from her seat and summoned K with the press of a button on her cabin wall. “Hey you, asshole: get in here.”

K strode slick and erect into the room a short while later. He wasn’t quite her ideal protege’, but she’d broken off almost all the pieces of his personality she intensely disliked by now, and those others which she simply found insipid, she’d molded into something at least passable. The men still didn’t respect him, but they did respond to him, more or less. He stood rigidly, and watched her, ready for her typical greeting in return for his prompt appearance.

But, being the woman of business that she was, J spared him her usual backhand to the mouth, as she had a plan of action to discuss, and no time to waste on watching him pick himself back up off the floor.

“We’re re-routing to Kanto,” she said, without preamble.

“Understood.”

J frowned. “Don’t want to know why?”

K wondered if he should shake his head in line with his thoughts. He didn't, particularly, but he clamped his neck tight to his shoulders, and parroted the question he knew she wanted. “Why are we re-routing to Kanto?”

J, in the way that she did, responded to his vague query, with one even more vague. “Didn’t you used to be a Gym Leader, there?” He was almost sure this was a complex set up for a joke, which ended with something getting smashed over his head, or jabbed in his eyeball somehow. 

After all, J’s idea of a “sight-gag” was most probably something that resulted in the permanent loss of the recipient’s sight.

Still, K kept his cool. If she’d dragged him in here so she could laugh at his pain, better to take it now, while the joke was still a one-liner, rather than later, after she’d really worked herself up into a frenzy, and turned it into a whole skit. “Yes.”

J reached out to her laptop and spun it around. “Have you ever met this person?”

He wondered if it was prudent for him to mention that he’d only been an unofficial gym-leader. “Not in person,” he admitted, of the Saffron Gym-Leader. “But I’ve heard of her. Isn’t she supposed to be some sort of medium, or something?”

J smirked. “That, and so much more, it would seem.”

He wondered if this was still part of the joke. “Why do you ask?”

Typical to form, rather than tell him, she asked another question, this one, he was sure, far more in line with the evil prank she’d intended to pull from the beginning: “Have you ever... been with a girl, K?”

He felt that honesty was the best policy. “No.”

She chortled. And then came the delivery. He wasn’t sure he saw the humor part of the black humor she’d no doubt invested, and likely wouldn’t until far later, but all the same, he knew it was the punchline the moment she said it. “Well, I’d suggest you practice... Because we’re about to get with this one.”


	7. The Chance Arrival

Sabrina’s office was quite small, being that she’d never intended it as an administrative space. It didn’t compare to the auxiliary rooms in the larger complexes of Kanto, even though her own Gym, cavernous and empty, was by far and again the largest in the Region. It was more of an abbreviated meditation room, of a type, with kneeling-height table and a small round cushion and not much else. She didn’t come in here to file paperwork, or handle expense reports, being as she had none, but rather, she came in here in an effort to compact her thoughts. 

The Gym proper was huge, and out there, not much separated her from the vast city--the whole region really--which lay outside it. Out there, thoughts buzzed and hummed and yammered on endlessly, and sometimes, well...

She just got sick of it.

In here, with the walls so close, and the ambience so near, she could just hush them out, and sit with her fingers threading her hair, and think of nothing for a while. Which was good, in its way. 

She needed the quiet every so often. Not to really think, or concentrate. She was always thinking, always concentrating. Rather, this space was for not doing any of that. This space was just for being quiet. For doing nothing. And she found herself, lately, doing more and more of that.

She was just so...dissatisfied, lately. So restless.

Ash’s facet had left its own little mark on her, she supposed, as much as she’d left her own little mark on it.

“Adventure,” She sighed. What a silly little self-defeating facet. What a pointless little desire to have and to hold so close to your heart? How could you ever accomplish anything with such a backward, childish zest in your spirit?

And why now, did she feel that same repugnant thought growing like a cancer in her, as well?

And what should she even call this little fragment of herself, newly formed, disrupting so much indeed? Serendipity? Sojourn? ...Squander, seemed more apt, honestly.

Earlier today, she found herself thinking of the Orange Islands, not as places of interest, but rather, as places that were, in a word...interesting. She thought about how she might like to see them, with her own eyes, and not the eyes of her mind, to stand with her toes in the white sand, and face out over the sun-diamond waves into the distance, rather than visit them in her thoughts, even though she knew one was just as clear as the other. 

And she tried to block those thoughts out, by coming in here, her intent to think about very little, especially when it came to the subject of travel or of far-off experiences, none of which was worthwhile or meant for her in any capacity.

She forcefully, and willfully, thought of nothing. Of emptiness. Of centralization. Of complete and utter blankness.

So much so, that she jumped with a start when there came a knocking on her office door.

“Y-yes?!” she said, unable to hide stark alarm.

When in strode her single greatest source of discomfort, Sabrina found herself subconsciously scooting her cushion back toward the wall. As the wall was very close indeed, this did not provide much physical distance to Roxie at all.

Roxie positively slithered into the room. She’d gone through who knew how many complimentary-sized bottles of hard liquor with her first-class meal on the airplane, and--easily construed by her loping gait--much else since. “Oh, so you are here, luv.” 

Sabrina chose to say nothing, but this had far from the intended effect of letting the rock-star know she was less than welcome. Roxie, it seemed, was either too drunk and socially inept to know she was being put off, or else, which was more likely, she was too devious and lowly-cunning to allow that sort of thing to interfere with her outgoing and honestly, over-forward advances. 

Roxie, instead of looking around and commenting on the tiny space, just shrugged and set her shit down in a great crash of duffle and guitar-case, crowding the already crowded room even further. “‘Ow are you, dahling?”

Sabrina pursued a course of honesty, not for the sake of politeness, but for the sake of implication. “I’ve been better.”

Roxie, in a show of unexpected intuition, read between the lines. Evidently, there was much subtlety lost between Unovan and Kantonese, however, as what she read there seemed quite different than what Sabrina had intended to convey.

Easily seeing that something was bothering the object of her untoward affections, Roxie crooned. “Did you really miss me that much?”

Again, Sabrina chose not to comment, lest she make things somehow more difficult for herself, via Roxie’s deliberate and willful misunderstanding.

Roxie smiled, in a way that reminded Sabrina of how Basculin bared their teeth mid-jump toward solitary, helpless prey. “You’ll be ‘appy to know then, that I’ve ‘ad a slight change of heart, since our last meetin’.”

From the look on her face, Sabrina very much doubted that. Their last meeting had ended somewhat abruptly, with Roxie looking very confused that her advances were stymied. She was not used to being snubbed, evidently. Still, the brusque hand up the back of her skirt, and roughly seized handful of her butt on the walk home from the cinema had more than earned Roxie the unrepentant slap that had concluded their “date” with one another. 

...and that was only because she had grudgingly let the hole cut in the bottom of the popcorn bucket in Roxie’s lap slide on false pretenses.

She held up a hand to forestall her sexual assault, as a matter of course. “I haven’t, in the slightest.”

Roxie had the decency at least, to pretend to be aghast. “I’ll ‘ave you know, that I am prepared to be all manners of polite, dahling. Treat you like a proper lady, I will. No funny business. Nuffin’ you don’t ask for, at least.”

Sabrina wondered if Roxie meant “ask for” in a consensual, verbal sense, or somewhat more in terms she imagined Sabrina’s body implied, simply by being within arms reach. “And, say, hypothetically, this were to interest me in the slightest bit?”

“Why then, I would take you on a proper date, of course, wouldn’t I?” Roxie smiled, not so much easing down into a seating position, as collapsing onto her backside, legs spread wide in an undignified, casual display of striped knickers. Sabrina didn’t believe for a second this was a product of her drunken disregard, so much as a purposeful show of smallclothes meant for her intentional viewing.

Sabrina, quite above that sort of thing, bored holes into Roxies face with her gaze. “Proper, as in...?” The vernacular was not lost on her, so much as she prefered Roxie not have irony or sarcasm to mask her real intentions behind.

“Proper Dinner, Proper Stroll in the Park, Proper Nightcap, and a Proper Walk Home, dahling. Wot else?” Roxie smirked. “Though, I won’t hold out on you, if I should provoke a Proper Kiss on the Cheek before you step inside and leave me there on the steps, eh?”

Sabrina wondered where the Proper Fuck would make it’s debut, in Roxie’s supposed ideal evening. She wasn’t some naive girl. She could already read Roxie’s thoughts, one and all on the matter, and for a certainty, most of them, the overwhelming majority of them--damn near none of them, in fact--were as proper as she was professing them to be, aside from those stated.

Six months ago, Sabrina would have thrown her straight out of the gym. Literally. Straight out. Picked her up off the floor, and hurled her, psychically, straight through the office door, out a window, and into traffic.

Hell, six minutes ago, she’d have done not much better.

But the Sabrina of right now, of right this very moment, was morbidly interested.

She cursed that little facet of Ash’s, and now of hers, to no end.

“What sort of thing did you have in mind?”

Roxie, who had at that moment, been looking to pounce, seemed to lose her predatory stance, to uncoil, to deflate a bit, from her aggressive posture. She closed her legs, and tucked them aside, leaning backward. It was almost as if she couldn’t really believe she’d been successful. Sabrina knew she couldn’t believe it either.

They sat there, both of them blushing for a long minute, and at last, Roxie, coming to a decision opened her mouth to deliver her proposal.

But that’s all she got to do.

Because right there, right in that window of time between query and response, was when half of the Saffron Gym was vaporized.

J’s airship, invisible overhead, turned broadside against the updraft of heat and smoke, and two figures rappelled down through the fire and the chaos, as the plasma cannons steamed, and cooled slowly, in the aftermath of their terrible opening volley.

K hit the ground, which was little more than rubble now, just a split second before J herself, but he was already on task before J could order him around.

He crashed through the burning door, and took the lesser of the two women inside, dazed and wounded by the main-gun’s terrible strike, and dragged her out, unceremoniously, by a hooked underarm and a handful of hair.

J, stepped into the room as soon as he vacated it, charge in tow, even though it was now mostly a niche cut into a barely standing wall. Instead of Roxie, it was J who answered the question that only moments ago, Sabrina had put to Roxie.

“What did I have in mind?” J laughed obnoxiously, wheezing at the depths of whatever stood in place of her lungs. “Oh, you’ll find out soon enough.”


	8. The Sudden Showdown

Its said sometimes that when an unstoppable force acts upon an immovable object, one or the other must be inevitably proven fallacious. Sabrina, however, was no longer so certain. 

“Dont move.” J said imperiously, putting her hand up in protest when Sabrina reached for the clip where she kept her poke balls. 

Sabrina could have guffawed. She didn’t really have to reach for them, did she? But then, rather than simply tug on of them off with her mind, and sending it hurtling out anyways, in defiance, she did something rather more cruel.

“Have it your way,” she snickered, and pressed energy outward into the room, from within. She didn’t need to gesture, or throw her hands about. Not to smash durants like these...

Or so she had thought.

The initial effect was pleasing. J flew backward, all the same, her heavy metal legs digging two trenches in the debris as she pancaked into the formerly load-bearing wall, both her own over-laden weight and Sabrina’s mental force crushing her nearly a half-meter into the cement.

A normal person would have been smashed to pulp, and then had that constituent pulp smashed into simply juice. J, however, only slumped into a heap when she was done, as the wall itself gave way and fell on top of her.

But that wasn’t where it ended. That metal hand punched up from the crushed concrete and dragged the rest of the corpse-machine out with it, before she could even get up off the cushion. This did divest Sabrina of some, though certainly not all of her confidence. 

She considered almost immediately pulverizing J down to scrap-metal, but she simply couldn’t do that without killing Roxie in the exchange. Psychic energy of that magnitude would prove lethal to those in the vicinity, especially with so many potentially-flying, heavy pieces of metal and stone lying around. So, she went with her initial play.

The pokeball zipped off her belt, and twanged hard off of J’s face-plate as it cracked open. Before J could fully extricate herself, Espeon was flipping out of the backspin, and pouncing down onto her shoulders, smashing her back into the dusty crags of fallen structure, with an opening Tackle.

But even this, it proved, was not enough to stop J. Her back contorted weirdly, as she twisted, well beyond the capacity of any natural human, to face Espeon from beheath. Once she got that cannon in line, this fight would end fast enough. 

“Away!” she commanded, and the beam from J’s arm struck the wall alongside them, doing nothing of consequence, save removing all evidence that the room they’d stood in just moments ago had ever been, as Espeon leapt clear.

Following up rapidly, but with calm surety, Sabrina called for her next move. “Zen Headbutt.”

J, now stymied twice, did not have the patience it seemed, for a third demonstration of her ability to withstand assault, and put her own pokemon into play. Its countermove was immediate, and effective in the extreme. 

She had nearly been trademarked for her Salamence. She had gone everywhere with it, and it’s demeanor and attitude had been every bit as cutthroat and aggressive as her own, so it stood to reason that people thought of it as being her biggest threat.

People thought that, because they had never met her Drapion. And the reason most people had never met her Drapion, is because most that did, never had a chance to speak upon their impressions of it. What with being dead, and all.

“Night Slash!” J seethed, and the two pokemon met equidistant from their trainers, one flying headlong, and the other, swinging in from beneath. It didn’t take a genius to figure out which one shortly went sailing back the way it had come.

But Espeon wasn’t down for the count, it proved, as it came sliding back to Sabrina’s feet, balanced precariously, and none too eager to test its balance by leaping back into the fray. Sabrina turned sideways, and used her psychic energy to block J’s follow-up, which was of course, intended to capitalize on the momentary shock of the initial blow. Resultantly, Drapion’s Toxic Spikes scattered to either side, deflected by a wedge of transparent force, from hitting either Sabrina or her pokemon.

Interfering in the progress of an ongoing matchup with her own abilities probably would have drawn a gasp of indignation from the other Gym Leaders, and out-and-out frowns from her League minders, of course, but she supposed she could be excused her unfair advantage in this scenario, given that this seemed to be somewhat outside the accepted criteria for a league-approved Gym-battle.

She certainly wouldn’t be handing out any Marsh Badges, at any rate, she thought, as she pressed her advantage a bit more, by reaching out a little further, and lifting Drapion off the ground with heavy rising force, to tumble back onto it’s trainer in a tangle of twitching bug legs and machine arms scrambling for purchase.

J cursed under the immense weight and shifting form, but Sabrina only sniggered. “What, did you think this would be easy?”

Roxie, however, was having a somewhat different time of things, not too far away. 

 

She come around slower than the other gym-leader, wondering why in the hell Sabrina was being so rough with her, in her disoriented state. “Awrite, awrite, girl. If you wanted it so badly, all you ‘ad to do was say so.” 

She was halfway through lifting her dress up over her stomach with her one free arm, when she was finally jarred back to reality by K’s elbow colliding with her face. “Ow!” She grimaced as she fell to the dirt, quite amused and half-naked. K reached down to grab her again, but she used the greatest of all human and pokemon defenses: Thrash.

K, it seemed, was of a Type she’d never had pleasure to meet, as the results could only be described as super-effective.

She bucked out of his grasp, as he came to clasp her about the middle, and, being more slightly more wiry and a fair deal meaner that he’d expected, she rained in on him from all sides with blows. None of them was particularly competent or damaging when taken as individuals, but collectively they left him with no choice but to withdraw, while she somehow followed after him, pinching and scraping, and pulling and gouging. When she finally got a kick through to his ill-protected groin, and jammed her thumb in his eye as he bent over to cough, he knew he had bitten off far more than he could chew.

Roxie didn’t even spare him a second to attend to her own modesty, but simply ripped a pokeball right from where she kept them clipped to the side-tie of her t-string, and marched straight into him, ass on full display.  
It wasn’t her that he was concerned about, really, when push actually came to shove, but rather the potent, and for that matter pungent pokemon she put into play. 

He tried to get a pokeball of his own out, he really did, but before he was able, Garbodor washed over him in a tidal-wave of sticky, disgusting refuse. He was smashed to the floor by garbage and slime while above, Roxie laughed until her ribs were sore. “You fucking twat! You fink you can just get as handy as you like with me?! Not on your life, arsehole!” 

She pointed mockingly, even though K’s face was all but covered with Garbodor’s reeking effluvia which sought to worm its way into his mouth and nose in spite of his violent wriggling, and seep down his throat. “Now you get to taste somefin’ really foul! Maybe not the taste what you were ‘opin’ for, was it?”

In violent struggle for life and the freedom to vomit up the lump total of his internal organs, K finally punched a hand through the scum and grime. He had to count on the contents of the pokeball clutched therein to handle the remainder of the work itself, of course, as there was no way he wasn’t going to spend the remainder of the battle doing much besides puking and crying, and puking some more. Sandslash, however, was the pride of all his training, and no more capable pokemon existed in for a hundred kilometers in any direction, certainly not within the confines of what had once been this room.

Sandslash tore into Roxie’s pokemon with vigor, scattering it about like wind-blown litter, and freeing its trainer beneath in no time, as Roxie watched. She didn’t figure it was so much a disaster for her pokemon, since Garbodor would recollect itself in a great heap of shit-stinking trash after a while anyhow, just like it always did, but that left her pretty defenseless in the meantime.

So, she chose then to perform the second greatest defensive maneuver known to human and pokemon-kind. There were two things Roxie knew above all else, when it came to battling, after all: There was a time to press the attack, and there was a time to Run Away!

Knowing when she was beat, Roxie turned and quick-stepped back to safety. Sabrina looked like she was having an easier time of things after all, and she could regroup with Weezing later, when the heat was off. When she tripped slightly, coming up on Sabrina and fell face-first, of course, one had to hope the distraction of her bare rump protruding into the air just aside didn’t serve as too much of a distraction.

It didn’t. Sabrina saw it, of course, but whatever lascivious quality it held was somewhat supplanted by her desire to put a boot-heel into it, as she realized she now had J and her Drapion to the fore, and an angry Sandslash to the rear, however green and spewing it’s trainer was.

Drapion was keeping up the spike-barrage and without Roxie’s help, she could hardly be bothered to fend off both, without investing some serious energy, which, while it would certainly handle all the pressing issues, was going to kill any non-psychic entity in the room in no uncertain terms. 

Rather than fling Roxie into the distance, which was her first instinctual desire, she simply did what seemed the next logical course. 

Roxie, of course, didn’t care for the plan at all, when her only safe haven went on her merry way, by levitating up into the air. “Oi! Come back!” she hollered, jumping to grab for Sabrina’s departing ankles and missing.

With Espeon leaping away to find a new vantage, and Sabrina’s psychic barrier floating up into the air right along with her, the Ex-Virbank gym-leader was caught in the Toxic Spike crossfire.

She turned away defensively, taking three or four in the flank. All told, she wasn’t all that concerned about their poisonous after effects--she could probably go around licking hand-rails and toilet-seats for all the built-up immunity being a Poison-type specialist had given her over the years-- but either way, a high-speed spine right in the bare ass hurt like a son-of-a-bitch just the same! 

She looked up irritatedly, as Sabrina glided higher. “You suck!” she hollered, butt stinging, as she gingerly pried the barb loose.

Sabrina only shrugged down at her, disregarding, as Roxie, now surrounded, finally had the dignity to pull her dress back down. She wanted to add something more, scathingly at her departing date, but then, J was the next to speak to her, shouting above.

“You may as well come back down here!” J protested. “You’re coming with me, like it or not!” Looking ahead, at the other Gym-Leader, now trapped, she added: “Arceus knows I’d prefer not.”

“You’re a twisted freak, lady.” Roxie spat.

Behind, K, finally recovering from his retching, offered a weak admittance as he wiped his mouth. “Yeah. That’s sortof her thing.”

Ignoring both of them, J spoke into the communicator on her visor, with one extended finger to ear piece. “This is Evil Stepmother, to Clanking Shit-Heap.”

The radio operator in the Ship above, evidently none too satisfied with his radio call-sign, hesitated on the response: “...T-this is Clanking Shit-Heap. We read you, Evil Stepmother.”

“Drop the jammer.”  
There was a heavy mechanical sound from above, as the cloaked bay doors opened, revealing a perfect rectangle of the inside of J’s cargo-bay in the sky. “Psychojammer, a’weigh,” the control officer announced.

A huge pyramidal shape was cut loose from the bay, and plummeted, the second it was released. It fell with such speed, and collided with such impact that it was all that Roxie could do to backpedal out of range before it threw her aside anyways, by making the ground jump, and pelting her with debris.

Inside was such an interesting thing, that even Sabrina had to take notice of it. Being made of some hardened, transparent substance, it showed off its innermost contents, quite readily. J commented before any could draw their speculation. “An incredibly rare pokemon, for sure. I was co-opted by some third-party proxy of the League to bring it in. Evidently it belongs to one of their own. Must have gotten lost while it was looking for him, the sap.” She chuckled. “But it doesn’t matter. Since they hired me through a mutual party, I figured, why not get some use out of it, while it’s mine?”

She smiled as she looked at the Darkrai in its technological cage, all of it’s strength bound and useless... at least for now. She had no intention of setting it free, of course, at least not until she was a good thousand kilometers distant, but there was still something she could use it for, even if it’s physical form was locked tight into unbreakable restraints.

“Fire it up!”

From the ship, the remote control sensor suite in the containment pyramid was activated. Two long metal probes, specifically adapted for this purpose, protruded threateningly, their clawed tips crackling with energy. Darkrai struggled pointlessly, but the probes dove home all the same.

When the sharp, quick, gigavolt shock arced through Darkrai, the pokemon gave the containment device everything it had. There was no escape from the pyramid, for Darkrai itself, but that terrible dark force for which the pokemon was so famed, screamed outward in all directions, rendered harmless by the container to all but those who were diametrically opposed to it. 

Espeon, hit first, let out a sound that sounded like an animal being led to slaughter, and then collapsed as though dead. Sabrina, who for the life of her, tried to teleport away, the result was no different. She screamed, only once, and then plummeted like a stone.

Roxie backpedaled, then stepped sideways, then scrambled two steps to the other side, not realizing that Sabrina was tumbling, and that she was never going to predict a landing point . “I got you, I got you!” she promised, as Sabrina hurtled faster and faster.

She leapt, and found her jump overblown, though it hardly mattered. When Sabrina fell across her back, Roxie felt like she’d been smashed clean in half. Why had she even imagined she could catch someone falling from so high?! 

“...I don’t got you,” she complained, as she was sure the incredible pain of a crushed lumbar was the only thing keeping her from passing out as J and K loomed overhead.

“No,” K agreed, spitting off to one side.

The last thing that Roxie saw before her face fell into the ground, was J chuckling as she reached down for the woman on the rock-star’s shattered back. “We do.”


	9. The Call For Help

Roxie cradled the phone almost as desperately as she cradled her spine, while she paced the steps that led to the half-gym. She could hear the police-women muttering in conversations behind her.

“So what it looks like to me.” Penny offered her junior counterpart “Is a smash and grab job. Give me means, probable cause, and a hypothesis on the perps whereabouts.”

Jenny, who’d only just a week ago been promoted to detective, floundered in the face of what was a completely atypical crime-scene. “Okay,” she acquiesced at last, dropped the piece of concrete she’d been turning over and over in her hands, for lack of a better clue.

What commenced was such a wild deconstruction as Roxie had never heard in her entire life.

“So, I’m thinking with this level of devastation, we’re looking at something like a Tornadus, or... a Groudon.” 

When Penny ventured no opinion, Jenny was forced to amend: “Maybe a Mega-Groudon. Smashed in the entryway here, went ape-shit on the west half of the buildingand meanwhile the occupants fled over there to...” She pointed to the small protuberance of foundation slab that had been Sabrina’s tiny office. “What I assume was the bathroom.”

“Okay, probable cause.”

Jenny really had to grasp for this one. “Some team beef, I would guess. Revenge? I heard the G.L. forced a shut-down on some Team stake in the Radio Tower a few months ago. This is their reprisal, maybe.”

Penny, again, offered no denial or confirmation. “Current whereabouts?”

“Best place would be Silph, obviously. Closeby, but still safe enough for Rocket thugs. Not like we can storm their offices with this little hard evidence. Jenny kicked one of the busted joists, then sighed in frustration.

Roxie, sparing no volume whatsoever for the sake of the two confused officers, started wailing at Nicky the second he picked up the phone.

“They took her, Nick! They beat us up real bad, and popped off with my Sabby somewhere, and I don’t know where and I gotta find ‘er and I need your ‘elp and--”

“Woah, woah, woah!!” Nicky shouted, stifling her tears. “What’s going on, Rox!? One step at a time, for Arceus’ sake! I can’t understand you when you’re crying like that--”

“They took Sabby!--”

“Who--”

“That bird what I was after in Kanto a few months back! Sabrina! The Gym-Leader!”

“You mean the one that blue-balled you? The recluse virgin?”

“That’s the one, mate! I was just easin’ my way back in to her black, black heart, when quick as you like, these two goons show up, with purple coats visors on, and smash up the bloody place!” she explained in a rush

“What place, Roxie?! You’re not making any sense!”

“I’m in Kanto, you bloody--” Roxie gnashed the insult short. “I’m at her Gym!”

“What the hell are you doing there!?”

Unable to properly enunciate the plan, with the silliness of it suddenly striking her as ludicrous, Roxie found that all she could do for a minute was sob. “It’s not fuckin fair, mate! I were this bloody close!” She held up a gap between two fingers even though she hadn’t turned on the camera of her gear.

Nicky, it seemed, could only listen to her moan and cry for a while, before he went on, chastened. “Roxie, I really want to help you, here. But you gotta give me something more than what you are!”

Roxie tried to explain the best she could. “Look, mate: I came over ‘ere, hoping she could help me with my Meloetta problem. And maybe that’s all it was for, at first! But I swear, it felt like I was really gaining some grounds with young totty, and then out of the fuckin’ blue, half the damned Gym goes arse-over-tits! Ka-pow! And then the next ‘fing I know, I’m getting man-handled by this dopey-looking kid with a spiked up chop-top, and the battle is on, yeah? We scrap with these guys, me and Sabby both, and--” here she amended for the sake of her own propriety. “It seems like we’re winning, but then, out of some fuckin’ weird invisible bomber-plane, she drops this crazy fuckin’ gismo with a Darkrai in it, and the next ‘fing I know, everybody’s going down screaming. I get busted across the back, and these two fuckin’ axe-murderers make off with the object of my desires like they were just there to pick up a package! Now, it isn’t bloody rocket-surgery, here, is it? I need to find these two goons, and find Sabby, before they’ve scattered her across the ocean in little choice segments, right? Now do you know somebody ‘oo can help me do that, or not!? I need to get airborne, and I need it an hour ago!” 

She spared a small glance at the two officers, who were staring at her open-mouthed, but mostly, she listened for Nicky’s response.

“I may know somebody,” Nicky said after a long while. “No promises, but I think I can get just the kind of person you need to do me a favor.”

“Nicky, you’re a bloody saint.” Roxie said, wiping her eyes. “Do us a solid, though, luv.”

“What’s that?”

Roxie tutted as she watched the two detectives abandon their stake on the rubble-pile and approach menacingly. “Once you’ve sorted it all out, return my call at the Saffron Precinct, eh? I’ve got a feeling I’m about to be intensely questioned on a few things.”


End file.
